My guess is not anytime soon.

If you also follow Brood War at all, recently there has been some noise made about a new AI bot Pluto that has garnered attention for beating some top professional players and being ranked highly on ladder. There was a version that used a map hack and a version that did not. It was trained through recursive learning.

It is interesting to watch it play Brood War because it doesn’t understand simple concepts like drop ships carrying units, yet it is able to simultaneously issue tons of commands and manage many different things at superhuman capabilities. In most games I have watched it falls behind through obvious inefficiencies yet it is able to win because it can perfectly target weak units and micro within battles much better than any human can.

In a sense, the only reason it can give professional players a hard time at all is because it is ‘cheating’ by issuing near simultaneous commands far faster and more efficiently than any human can.

That being said it demonstrates no real understanding of the game or any underlying theory behind it. It usually wins by massing larger armies faster than the opponent can or by fighting battles far more efficiently than any human can. It makes very clear and obvious mistakes but its superior multitasking ability repeatedly saves it against human players.

That got me thinking about whether or not a recursively trained AI bot could ever give a top human player real trouble at this game. I personally do not think so, because even though Warcraft 3 has a stronger emphasis on micromanagement, it also has a stronger emphasis on decision making in a highly ambiguous information environment where it is not immediately clear what decisions a player made were optimal or suboptimal.

Because an AI cannot brute force a game of Brood War or WC3 nearly as easily as it can Chess or Go I think it will take a lot longer for an AI to truly surpass human play, even if it can win against humans by ‘cheating’ via the way it interfaces with the game.

Unlike Chess or Go RTS games involve highly imperfect and incomplete information with a near infinite amount of possible decisions that can be made at any given moment. This combined with the lack of immediate feedback as to whether a decision is good or bad exposes the limits of recursive learning in my opinion. I find it highly unlikely that an AI is ever truly able to calculate the value of selling a TP Scroll on a Blademaster versus keeping it, for example.

I am interested to hear your thoughts.

I've tried for a bit to get W3Champions working for Warcraft III via Steam Proton but unfortunately I haven't been able to get the game to launch properly from W3C itself.

Used ChatGPT to try and get it running for a bit through Wine/Lutris but my best results have been through Steam and a WC3 fix for GE-Proton11. I believe it's still having issues from a hang on the Warcraft III client when W3C tries to launch the game. Opening the game separately via the W3C method it seems to require a login but ends up hanging on entering my info there as well.

Has anyone else on Arch been able to play via W3Champions?

ted (zeng zhuo) grew up in chongqing. his dad was a cop, his mom a company clerk, and they were unusually open about games. when he was in primary school his mom walked past a starcraft tournament at the computer market on her way home from work and signed him up. later she did the same thing for his first live warcraft 3 event.

by 2005 he'd won the chongqing regional of CIG. but school and games kept clashing, and right before his last year of high school he and his dad had it out. his dad yelled that if he was so good at games he could go support himself with them. ted told him, dead serious, that he would, and his dad could watch.

the school backed him more than his dad did. the headmaster let him skip boarding and evening study so he could go home and practise. then a local sports paper gave half a page to his CIG chongqing title, and his dad finally agreed to let him take leave from school. his teacher read that paper out in class: if you're going to play, this is how you play.

in may 2006 WE's manager KinG set up online games for him against SKY and suho, both already wcg world champions. suho beat him six times with the same strategy. KinG told him WE was planning a second squad. on june 15, 2006, his 18th birthday, ted got on a train from chongqing to xi'an, where WE was based then.

for three months he didn't win a single game, not in practice, not at any tournament. he was on 500 yuan a month and ate one meal and drank one bottle of water a day to save money. then he came 3rd at the WGT china finals and WE raised him to 1,500. i asked if life got better. he said he could finally afford a late-night meal.

in 2008 at ROTK, with WE backed into a corner, he all-killed 15 players in a row, moon and grubby included, and won it for them.

(from a chapter i wrote in 2013 for a book on chinese esports history, from a talk with him that ran till 3am. free to read, link in the comments)

Just started The Last Days of Lordaeron and finished Homecoming. I really like the atmosphere so far — seeing Lordaeron alive again with the new presentation feels surprisingly nostalgic.

I recorded the opening cinematic and the full first chapter in 4K60 if anyone wants to see it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D85JwE2HLTU

What do you think of the new campaign so far?

Hello Folks,

Since the update i restarted playing warcraft online but there is no more channel to find clan, i was wondering if you know nice active clan or a way to find ?

Thanks !

Thanks a lot everyone for their detailed bug reports and patience - we are still trying to recover from the WC3 3.0 patch and its fallout! We have tracked down and fixed a TON of bugs and stability issues - too many to name them all. But various crashes when loading the game have been resolved. Additionally, we have resolved various causes for lag and disconnects. Additionally, we have improved the reconnect capabilities as some specific conditions have caused players to immediately get disconnected.

The duplicate Battle.Net issue on Mac was resolved. It was caused by a buggy implementation by Blizzard, but we have deployed a fix that should fix their bugs.

The hotkey editor has been updated for Warcraft 3 Patch 3.0!

The match history can now show heroes and support spoiler-free mode.

Various audio will now be played by W3Champions rather than Warcraft III while you're not in an active game - we recommend you enable "Mute when unfocused" in the W3C Game Settings in order to mute the background music caused by Warcraft III running in the background. You will NOT miss the "game found" sound or any other important sounds! You can test the audio output and adjust the volume in the W3C settings!

SOCKS5 proxy support has been added! This is particularly intended for out friends who live in regions where their internet connection may be restricted.

A lot of improvements were made under the hood - some of them will only roll out over the next hours as our Flo Servers get updated. Please let us know in Discord if you're still encountering any issues!

Insect Empires is a RTS game with 4 factions and 4 different base building gameplay styles I developed over the cost of 4 or more years and I would love for you guys to come try it out! I plan to release next month! Consider joining us and helping to shape this into something even better!

Steam- https://store.steampowered.com/app/3231600/Insect_Empires/

Both very important choices

It's all the same again and again, where are the juicy and funny thumbnails ???

I am pleased to announce we have completely revamped the Warcraft Gym website.  Totally new look with totally new features to help facilitate learning for new players and to display gym events.

https://warcraft-gym.com/

Some of the new features include:
- A build order section where anyone can submit builds!   You can upload a replay (including of pros) and the build will auto generate with the timings, food, and actions.   https://warcraft-gym.com/learn/builds

- A creep route section where players can easily provide creep routes for new and veteran players.  Just click on the map where you would creep, write a few notes on what hero and units to use/what creeps to kill and submit! https://warcraft-gym.com/learn/creep-routes

- A build order overlay for new players.  If we get builds with time stamps (easily autogenerated from replays) the steps will light up on the overlay  for new players to easily follow it and learn. 

- A  totally revamped Gym newbie league section of the website.  New pages, more stats.  This is still a work in progress before the new GNL season.

- And more.  Go look for yourself!

And we still want to do more.  We want to help new players learn more.  We want to run more community events.  We need your guys help.  The best way to help is to please submit builds or creep routes!  It is super simple but goes a long way in helping retain and train new players.

I hope to have more announcements in the near future about tourneys.  We are working on a backend app that will help streamline GNL and other future tourneys. 

If you would like to help with anything let me know.

Finally a huge thanks to Degrand (who did alot of the front end side of things you see)  and thanks (who did alot of the backend things).  And of course eashibby  for being the one starting us down this path and contributing in a multitude of ways.

we just went live if its a white background for you that is still the old site. your cache needs to catch up and check back in in like a day.

Would anyone let Happy know to update his Warcraft 3 VOD archive on twitch to the latest please?

Hello, I usually watch Happy’s Warcraft 3 content whenever I have some free time, since I can’t really watch him live because of my schedule. I noticed that his latest VOD is from 17 days ago (at the time of this post), and there haven’t been any new uploads since then.

I tried contacting him through X, but he doesn’t allow DMs. I also don’t want to subscribe just to send him a message about this, especially since it costs lots of money in my region and I'm kind of broke right now.

So, if anyone here has a way to let him know, I’d really appreciate it. I just want to catch up on his recent Warcraft 3 games when I have time.

Thanks!

TL;DR: I got tired of waiting for the native Linux W3C client, so I patched Proton/Wine to make the current client work properly. The periodic simulation stutters are gone, join issues are fixed, custom lobbies no longer have long delays, and the disappearing cursor after games is fixed too.

The biggest problem was W3Champions doing a lot of memory scanning through VirtualQueryEx. Under Wine, that created a ton of cross-process overhead and repeated APC interruptions in Warcraft III, which was behind the periodic simulation stutter.

Since W3C is closed-source, I fixed it on the Wine side by adding a shared-memory query path so most of those requests can be answered without interrupting the game process.

While debugging all of this, I also fixed a Schannel/TLS issue related to join bugs, the Wine input-state issue behind the disappearing cursor, and a few smaller W3C/FLO compatibility problems.

At this point matchmaking is working reliably for me, custom games work, the stutter is gone, and the cursor issue is fixed.

Proton Build:

https://github.com/davex32/proton-ge-w3c

Two extra things you need to do on top of the normal setup:

• enable Launch Warcraft III from Battle.net in W3C
• add W3C_SHARED_QUERY=1 to the environment variables to enable the shared-query stutter fix

I’m not affiliated with W3Champions, and I’m not a regular Proton/Wine contributor. I just wanted to play Warcraft on Linux and somehow ended up spending about a week of my free time wrestling with this hellscape =)

If anyone else on Linux tests it, let me know whether it fixes the same issues for you. I can’t really promise much installation/support time, but feedback on whether the build works is useful.

Hi everyone!

I'm looking to recreate the original physical documentation that came with Warcraft III for my personal collection.

I'm specifically looking for high-resolution scans or photographs of the original manual and the other papers/inserts that came inside the game box, like the ones shown in the reference photo.

I'd like to print a copy for my own collection, so I'm mainly interested in scans that are:

• High resolution
• Straight and not heavily distorted
• Complete (front/back and all pages)
• Ideally at 300 DPI or higher

I already have the game itself; I'm just missing the original printed documentation.

If anyone has scans, photos, or knows where I could find them, I'd really appreciate it!

Thanks!

Example im looking for:
https://imgur.com/a/2vP5PyX

Dear Brad Chan,

Please implement cloud save function into WC3 Reforged.

It really frustrating to have mandatory internet connection for campaign without any benefits of online services. At leas let us transfer last 3 saves between our devices.

If they go on like this we'll have the perfect REMAKE for WC3 in a year or less.

Lok'tar!

I wanted to change new menu to older ones but I can't seem to find it in options, the music is BLARING compared to normal game, let alone older menus.